The Eurovision Song Contest 2012, Baku, Azerbaijan
This year marked the 57th anniversary of the global phenomenon that is The Eurovision Song Contest, which was held in Baku, Azerbaijan. The contest attracted an estimated 125 million viewers for Saturday’s final alone, in which 26 European countries out of the 42, qualified to participate. Turkish and Greek viewers had particular reason to thank us, as we developed part of the SMS voting system, giving 85 million subscribers in those countries a chance vote for their favourite.
For the 2012 shows, Digame was again appointed by the European Broadcasting Union to develop the worldwide televoting system, which would allow viewers to cast their votes either by text message or over the phone. InternetQ provided the SMS voting mechanism using the MobiDialog platform, capable of handling extremely high volumes to deliver the votes in Greece and Turkey during the semi-finals on 22 and 24 May and again for the grand final on 26 May.
Through the platform viewers could send the number of their favourite song to a five-digit shortcode during a 15-minute window on each of the three days of the event. The platform received over 1200 SMS per second, which were then forwarded in real time to the central processor, to generate the final results.
“Working with Digame on the Eurovision has been demanding and incredibly rewarding. It required precision accuracy, speed and efficiency due to the limited implementation time,” explained Ioannis Liaropoulos, Business Director of Media Operations at InternetQ. “The project has been a resounding success and means we have a new and satisfied client.”
